ABSTRACT MULATA MOTHERS: GENDER REPRESENTATION IN OSCAR HIJUELOS’ NOVELS by Karen Lee Dillon This thesis focuses on gender representation through the figure of the mulata mother in the novels A Simple Habana Melody, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien by Oscar Hijuelos. These novels and their representations of women and hybrid identities are studied by historically contextualizing the texts and their fictive content, and by viewing them through the perspectives of Cuban and American mulatez, tropicalization, cultural hybridity, and feminist critique. MULATA MOTHERS: GENDER REPRESENTAION IN OSCAR HIJUELOS’ NOVELS A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English By Karen Lee Dillon Miami University Oxford, OH 2004 Advisor______________________________ (Dr. Rodrigo Lazo) Advisor______________________________ (Dr. Madelyn Detloff) Advisor______________________________ (Dr. Whitney Womack) © Karen Lee Dillon 2004 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One The Mulata Mother in A Simple Habana Melody 7 Chapter Two The Mulata Mother in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien 13 Chapter Three Gender Representation in Mambo Kings, Habana Melody, and Fourteen Sisters 21 Chapter Four Mulata Mothers and Religion 42 Epilogue 49 iii Mulata Mothers: Gender Representation in Oscar Hijuelos’ Novels Introduction In the opening pages of Oscar Hijuelos’ most recent novel, A Simple Habana Melody, Rita Valladares, the central female character, is introduced to the reader as “La Chiquita,” as composer Israel Levis reminisces over a photograph of her in which she is “smiling, her eyes emanating life and love, a kind of music, like that of a fandango.”1 The comparison of Israel’s “beloved” Rita to a provocative Spanish/Spanish-American dance and music of courtship is intriguingly significant and appropriate for the role that she plays in the novel as Israel’s muse and object of desire, but mostly so in her identity as a Cuban mulata. That the fandango is a type of music that came to Cuba as a result of Spanish imperialist infiltration connects conveniently with the mulata’s presence in Cuba as a result of the same colonialism. The image of musical courtship illustrates the sexual and nostalgic power of the mulata performer to invoke for men like Israel the smoky romanticism of the night clubs of pre-revolutionary Cuba, but it also represents (European/American) outsiders’ fascination with and desire to gaze upon or sexually colonize the mulata’s seemingly exotic body. Although the figure of the mulata does not factor prominently in Hijuelos’ novels in that she does not play a title role and the complexities of her hybrid identity status are not explored psychologically or historically, illuminating and investigating the full implications of her character allow for an entirely new reading of Hijuelos’ texts. Literary studies regarding the hybrid identity of the mulata reach across cultures, genres, and centuries. Eduardo González refers to the rhetoric of mulatez as a “parasitic and erotic racism” whereby black or mulatta female bodies become both utilitarian in their use by Anglo men and eroticized because of the same sexual connotation.2 Jennifer DeVere Brody’s book Impossible Purities merges the seemingly exclusive fields of Victorian Studies and African 1 Oscar Hijuelos, A Simple Habana Melody (New York: Harper Collins, 2002) 8. All references to this novel will be hereafter cited parenthetically. 2 Eduardo Gonzalez, “American Theriomorphia: Mulatez in Cecilia Valdés and Beyond,” from Do the Americas Have a Common Literature, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990) 185. 1 American studies with the goal of exposing English literature’s racist discourse of miscegenation in the construction of English purity.3 Brody analyzes the Victorian literary tropes of hybridity and miscegenation that imply a prior existence of racial and sanguine purity to show both the falsity of that purity and to look at how it was historically deployed as a means of constructing boundaries. Impossible Purities examines texts that display fears of the monstrous or beastly threats of blackness and hybridity to English purity and subjectivity, invoking the theriomorphic origins of the term mulatez. The connotation of the mulata in Hijuelos’ novels differs from Brody’s work in that racist claims to purity are not an issue, nor is the mulata used as a sign of unnatural coupling; rather, she is used in a celebratory and idealized way because of her hybrid quality. Mulatta characters in the North American literary tradition are part of what Susan Gillman terms the “American race melodrama”—which includes texts like William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Francis Harper’s Iola Leroy. 4 The mulatta’s tale in this tradition becomes either tragic or romantic; tragic when her racial identity is established because of her kinship to the African-American race as in Clotel, and romantic when she uses her racial identity to establish kinship and communal ties as in Iola Leroy.5 According to Gillman, “the one- dimensional North American tragic mulatto moves passively, though inexorably, toward her fated death” as a victim of the institution of slavery.6 A beautiful white medium between the races and an agent for the politics of abolitionism, the North American mulatta’s story is not wholly for or against miscegenation, but is concerned with the perils of slavery. Although Hijuelos’ novels are not explorations of the conditions of the mulatta, nor are they textual fronts to the institution of slavery, they do invoke the historical context of the Cuban mulata that involves the politics of slavery and colonialism even though the mulata plays a seemingly ancillary role. What separates Hijuelos’ mulata characters from the traditional North American mulatta is that the cult of the mulata invoked by Hijuelos is culturally specific to Cuba. 3 Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 4 Susan Gillman, “The mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant? The 19th Century American Race Melograma,” from The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in 19th Century America, Shirley Samuels, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 222. 5 Gillman, 242. 6 Susan Gillman, “The Epistemology of Slave Conspiracy,” Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 49, Number 1 (Spring 2003) 104. 2 Cirilo Villaverde’s nineteenth-century novel Cecilia Valdés is perhaps the most prolific invocation of the Cuban cult of the mulata as “Cuba’s greatest cultural heroine” and arguably the figure responsible for “the construction of Cuban national identity” through Cuban literature.7 The novel can be linked to the North American tradition of the mulatta because of its status as a “transnational text” due to the fact that Villaverde was writing from and exiled position in New York, “destabiliz[ing] both US and Cuban national insularity.”8 Cecilia Valdés’ title mulata is a sexual being who signifies the colonial history of Cuba by recounting the physical, moral, and social conditions of the island through a historical framework, in essence “creat[ing] nineteenth- century Cuba.”9 Since the nature of mixed-race identity is necessarily “mapped out on the body of a woman because thinking about racial mixture inevitably leads to questions of sex and reproduction,” the Cuban mulata then becomes the primary site for what is essentially Cuban.10 Cuban literature in the tradition of Cecilia Valdés offers Cuba an “alternative mythic foundation in the Cuban cult of the mulata,” and the mulata, who at once was seen as a threat to racial stratification, is now seen as a national signifier of Cubanness. It is to this cult of the mulata that Hijuelos’ work harkens, both in his portrayal of the mulata and the grounding of his fictional contexts in real historical context, and through which a fresh reading of his texts can be made. According to Rodrigo Lazo, the “symbolic construction of Cecilia as Cuban woman is accomplished by presenting her within ‘a multitude of true events.’”11 These true events that Cecilia Valdés and Cuba’s cult of the mulata rest upon must be traced back to the beginning of mestizaje in Cuba because the history and culture of the Americas cannot be separated from colonialism and its consequences. Cuba had been a Spanish colony since the fifteenth century due to the importance and exploitation of the tobacco and sugar industry to consumers and Imperial powers. A 1791 slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue, one of if not the wealthiest and largest producers of coffee, sugar, tobacco, and dye in the Caribbean, opened the door for a new leading producer in the New World, and Cuba answered the demand in sugar production.12 The years following the revolt left Spain engaged in war with both France and 7 Suzanne Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Race Identities in the Americas 1850-2000 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press) 103. 8 Rodrigo Lazo, “Filibustering Cuba: Cecilia Valdés and a Memory of Nation in the Americas,” American Literature, Volume 74, Number 1 (March 2002) 3, 13. 9 Lazo, 13. 10 Bost, 2. 11 Lazo, 14. 12 Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 71. 3 England, and Cuba had the opportunity for trade with North America. In 1818, Spain opened